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Lot Essay
1934 (relief) is among the very first works in the highly celebrated series of white reliefs that established Ben Nicholson’s international reputation and represented his greatest contribution to Modernism. Hand-carved from a single piece of wood attached to the artist’s backboard, there is an intuitive spontaneity and craftsmanship to 1934 (relief) that is lacking in the precision of the later works in the series, as compass and set square replaced the artist’s eye and chisel. The present work is an extremely rare example from the genesis of this groundbreaking series, which preoccupied Nicholson for the remainder of the decade. His contemporary Paul Nash described this body of work as nothing less than ‘the discovery of a new world’ (quoted in J. Lewison, Ben Nicholson: The Years of Experiment 1914-39, Cambridge, 1983, p. 33).
Nicholson had made his first reliefs in the autumn of 1933, still working in the irregular, naturalistic idiom he shared with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. It was, however, a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in Paris, in April 1934, that ignited Nicholson’s fire and fuelled him to return to Hampstead to explore the possibilities of a new, totally stripped back aesthetic that combined painting, sculpture and architecture. Recalling Mondrian’s studio in detail—its height and narrowness, the coloured rectangles that had accumulated on the walls over twenty-five years, the sound of trains from the Gare Montparnasse below—what stayed with him most was something harder to grasp: ‘an astonishing feeling of quiet and repose’ (letter to J. Summerson, 3 January 1944, quoted in J. Summerson, Ben Nicholson, London, 1948, pp. 12-13). On his return to 7 Mall Studios in Hampstead, the studio he shared with Hepworth, Nicholson began to paint everything white—the walls, furniture, and, within weeks, the reliefs themselves—in an act of concentration that stripped away colour in pursuit of pure form.
1934 (relief) demonstrates precisely why that shift amounted to more than decoration. The composition’s stepped rectangular planes are anchored by a deeply incised circle at the lower left and a small carved notch at lower centre, an asymmetrical arrangement held in poised balance. Crucially, the circle is cut directly into the wood rather than drawn onto its surface, its shadowed recess giving it unmistakable physical weight against the surrounding plane. This carved treatment of the circle belongs to the earliest phase of the white reliefs, before Nicholson turned to pencilled line; surviving examples from this first, hand-worked moment of the series are exceedingly rare. Multiple coats of white paint, rubbed back between layers, unify carving and surface into what Nicholson wanted to feel like a single radiant material running through the object.
Herbert Read, writing the following year, recognised in these works a new fusion of painting, sculpture and architecture: pictures that ‘need space and light; they cannot have too much light. They are the only paintings that can look the sun in the face ... integral with light and precision, with economy and cleanliness—with all the virtues of modern sensibility’ (‘On Ben Nicholson’s Recent Work’, Axis, no. 2, April 1935, pp. 15-18). For Nicholson, the ambition ran deeper still: he described painting and carving as a search for ‘the understanding and realisation of infinity,’ an idea with no beginning and no end (statement for the Unit One exhibition, 1934, quoted in M. de Sausmarez, ed., Ben Nicholson: A Studio International Special, London, 1969, p. 31).
The private provenance of 1934 (relief) adds substantial weight to that ambition. The relief was acquired directly from the artist in 1935 by his patrons Henri and Henriette Frankfort and remained in their family for over fifty years. The Frankforts lived in Hampstead throughout the 1930s and were personally acquainted with Nicholson and Hepworth. They were part of the same extraordinary milieu that included Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, all of whom lived in the Lawn Road Flats, as well as Naum Gabo and Mondrian himself, leading Hampstead to become the crucible of European Modernism at the end of the 1930s. Henri Frankfort was among the foremost archaeologists of his generation: field director of the Chicago Oriental Institute’s expeditions in Iraq, and later Director of the Warburg Institute in London. His wife, Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort, was herself a distinguished archaeologist and art historian, later the author of Arrest and Movement (1951), a landmark study of how ancient Near Eastern art represented time—how the timeless, eternal postures of gods and rulers were set apart from the movement of ordinary human life.
There is something quietly fitting in the notion of two archaeologists acquiring a work that Read believed could ‘look the sun in the face’. Henri Frankfort’s own working life was spent largely in exactly that light, on excavations at Tell el-Amarna, Abydos and Armant, and later at Khorsabad and in the Diyala River Basin, under the sun of Egypt and Iraq. His interest in setting ancient and modern art in dialogue was not incidental: while teaching in Chicago, he arranged for a class to see a Picasso exhibition specifically to compare it with the ancient art he studied. The Frankforts’ acquisition of 1934 (relief) was the considered choice of scholars for whom the line between ancient form and modern form was a lifelong subject of enquiry.
1934 (relief) is among the earliest examples of the pure aesthetic that would define British Modernism. The freehand nature of the carved surface provides a tactility that sets this work apart from the precision of those that followed: there is a joy in seeing Nicholson navigate his new approach. ‘For BN to arrive at these deeply satisfying results implies a process of profound thought or concentration,’ writes Norbert Lynton, ‘persisting through the long and wearisome handwork demanded by cutting and digging and filing and smoothing or texturing the forms. The physical and the mental must not be seen as separate; they can function as complementary opposites. The hard-worked product is then invested in its alb of white paint and thus ordained to spiritual status’ (Ben Nicholson, London, 1993, pp. 126-129).
Nicholson had made his first reliefs in the autumn of 1933, still working in the irregular, naturalistic idiom he shared with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. It was, however, a visit to Piet Mondrian’s studio in Paris, in April 1934, that ignited Nicholson’s fire and fuelled him to return to Hampstead to explore the possibilities of a new, totally stripped back aesthetic that combined painting, sculpture and architecture. Recalling Mondrian’s studio in detail—its height and narrowness, the coloured rectangles that had accumulated on the walls over twenty-five years, the sound of trains from the Gare Montparnasse below—what stayed with him most was something harder to grasp: ‘an astonishing feeling of quiet and repose’ (letter to J. Summerson, 3 January 1944, quoted in J. Summerson, Ben Nicholson, London, 1948, pp. 12-13). On his return to 7 Mall Studios in Hampstead, the studio he shared with Hepworth, Nicholson began to paint everything white—the walls, furniture, and, within weeks, the reliefs themselves—in an act of concentration that stripped away colour in pursuit of pure form.
1934 (relief) demonstrates precisely why that shift amounted to more than decoration. The composition’s stepped rectangular planes are anchored by a deeply incised circle at the lower left and a small carved notch at lower centre, an asymmetrical arrangement held in poised balance. Crucially, the circle is cut directly into the wood rather than drawn onto its surface, its shadowed recess giving it unmistakable physical weight against the surrounding plane. This carved treatment of the circle belongs to the earliest phase of the white reliefs, before Nicholson turned to pencilled line; surviving examples from this first, hand-worked moment of the series are exceedingly rare. Multiple coats of white paint, rubbed back between layers, unify carving and surface into what Nicholson wanted to feel like a single radiant material running through the object.
Herbert Read, writing the following year, recognised in these works a new fusion of painting, sculpture and architecture: pictures that ‘need space and light; they cannot have too much light. They are the only paintings that can look the sun in the face ... integral with light and precision, with economy and cleanliness—with all the virtues of modern sensibility’ (‘On Ben Nicholson’s Recent Work’, Axis, no. 2, April 1935, pp. 15-18). For Nicholson, the ambition ran deeper still: he described painting and carving as a search for ‘the understanding and realisation of infinity,’ an idea with no beginning and no end (statement for the Unit One exhibition, 1934, quoted in M. de Sausmarez, ed., Ben Nicholson: A Studio International Special, London, 1969, p. 31).
The private provenance of 1934 (relief) adds substantial weight to that ambition. The relief was acquired directly from the artist in 1935 by his patrons Henri and Henriette Frankfort and remained in their family for over fifty years. The Frankforts lived in Hampstead throughout the 1930s and were personally acquainted with Nicholson and Hepworth. They were part of the same extraordinary milieu that included Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, all of whom lived in the Lawn Road Flats, as well as Naum Gabo and Mondrian himself, leading Hampstead to become the crucible of European Modernism at the end of the 1930s. Henri Frankfort was among the foremost archaeologists of his generation: field director of the Chicago Oriental Institute’s expeditions in Iraq, and later Director of the Warburg Institute in London. His wife, Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort, was herself a distinguished archaeologist and art historian, later the author of Arrest and Movement (1951), a landmark study of how ancient Near Eastern art represented time—how the timeless, eternal postures of gods and rulers were set apart from the movement of ordinary human life.
There is something quietly fitting in the notion of two archaeologists acquiring a work that Read believed could ‘look the sun in the face’. Henri Frankfort’s own working life was spent largely in exactly that light, on excavations at Tell el-Amarna, Abydos and Armant, and later at Khorsabad and in the Diyala River Basin, under the sun of Egypt and Iraq. His interest in setting ancient and modern art in dialogue was not incidental: while teaching in Chicago, he arranged for a class to see a Picasso exhibition specifically to compare it with the ancient art he studied. The Frankforts’ acquisition of 1934 (relief) was the considered choice of scholars for whom the line between ancient form and modern form was a lifelong subject of enquiry.
1934 (relief) is among the earliest examples of the pure aesthetic that would define British Modernism. The freehand nature of the carved surface provides a tactility that sets this work apart from the precision of those that followed: there is a joy in seeing Nicholson navigate his new approach. ‘For BN to arrive at these deeply satisfying results implies a process of profound thought or concentration,’ writes Norbert Lynton, ‘persisting through the long and wearisome handwork demanded by cutting and digging and filing and smoothing or texturing the forms. The physical and the mental must not be seen as separate; they can function as complementary opposites. The hard-worked product is then invested in its alb of white paint and thus ordained to spiritual status’ (Ben Nicholson, London, 1993, pp. 126-129).